Vadim Makarov's home page

Vadim Makarov
I’m a scientist running Quantum hacking lab in Moscow and in Vigo. Here is my one-page CV (PDF), contact information, publications, and full biography.

What’s recent in my life:

November 2023. I now have a second lab at Vigo Quantum Communication Center in Spain and am jointly appointed there. My lab in Moscow still runs as well.

September 2023. I got appointed to an election committee of a nearby Vlasikha town in Russia that has some twenty thousand voters in nine precincts. The rest of the town’s election officials are basically there to rig every election in government’s favor. They tried to kick me out of the town and not let me check the process, and mostly succeeded at that. Only two of the nine precincts reported an honest vote count in the regional governor elections. I filed a dissenting opinion.

January 2023. Family with my mother-in-law and our new ginger cat Cleopatra, still in Moscow:

Makarov's family in Yudino, January 2023

2022. At the age of 48, I got cancer. Luckily, with recent medical advances, this particular type of cancer is nearly always curable (while 70 years ago it meant a rapid death). I’ve spent four months in a hospital on chemotherapy and have been discharged. I’m back to normal life, or rather an extended lifetime.

December 2020. We have purchased a house in a suburb of Moscow and moved there.

Makarov's family in Yudino, December 2020

April 2019. I’ve become a professor at MISiS university. I’m teaching a quantum communications course and labs in quantum photonics and cryptography, for MISiS and MIPT students.

May 2018. Earlier this year, the University of Waterloo has closed my lab. It is now being rebuilt at the Russian Quantum Center, Moscow.

February 2017. I’m no longer a member of the Institute for Quantum Computing, but my lab is still in Waterloo.

April 2015. Canadian immigration system would be very funny if I didn’t have to deal with it.

February 2015. In their infinite wisdom, Canadian immigration authorities have cleared me to work as a professor because my spouse is a student. At the same time, our permanent residency application (filed at the insistence of the university) was turned down for being over quota. Several thousand other clueless applicants met the same fate, because the government delayed by two months the public announcement that the quota was reached. O Canada!

conference took place in Waterloo on June 5–9, 2013. I was chairing the local organizing committee. This was a crazy thing to agree to: it took me two months of cumulative work time and 2500 emails. I won’t be chairing another conference any time soon :).

February 2012. I have moved to the Institute for Quantum Computing, Waterloo, Canada. I will have my own research group and lab here.

September 2011. I visited Heriot-Watt university in Edinburgh :),

Vadim at Heriot-Watt university, September 2011

and Zurich. You can watch online my invited talk at the QCrypt conference.

June 2011. The first ever fully-implemented eavesdropper on quantum cryptography has been published in Nature Communications. See picture page about our full evasdropping experiment. At this, I declare my 3-year postdoc term at NTNU finished with a reasonable success.

August 2010. Commercial quantum cryptography has been hacked. See our paper in Nature Photonics and picture page about the crack, with links to press coverage at the end.

August 2009. At Hacking at Random, I’ve given a lecture and demoed our quantum eavesdropping equipment. Watch the video of 50 min long lecture on YouTube.

Equipment demo at Hacking at Random conference (photographed by a visitor)

June 2009. Paper based on a significantly updated earlier preprint: V. Makarov, “Controlling passively quenched single photon detectors by bright light,” New J. Phys. 11, 065003 (2009).

September 2008. Preprint: V. Makarov, A. Anisimov, and S. Sauge, “Can Eve control PerkinElmer actively-quenched single-photon detector?”, arXiv:0809.3408 [quant-ph]. It has been covered in New Scientist, in arXiv blog, in Ars Technica, and in Adresseavisen (after that, I have discovered that most media and blogs often copy each other). See also our poster from SECOQC conference (PDF, 13.2 MiB).

Photo of me in the lab, from article in Adresseavisen

June 2008. After a year in Korea, I am back to our group in Trondheim, NTNU. We’re going to do some hacking, err... research about real level of security of today’s quantum cryptosystems.